The Kremlin has not publicly spelt out its plans. But defence experts said its response is likely to include upgrading its nuclear missile arsenal so that it is harder to shoot down, putting more missiles on mobile launchers, and moving its fleet of nuclear submarines to the north pole, where they are virtually undetectable.

You've got to love how the rest of the world feels so much more safe with Bush & Company in the white house!

And folks, the only people who win in this kind of "war" are the arms manufacturers.

Although Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Japan are not formally members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), they are linked through military partnerships, affiliated government agreements, a network of partnerships, and bilateral military agreements with the United States and Britain.

The creation of a parallel NATO-like organization in the Far East and the Pacific Rim is part of the international brinkmanship of creating a unified global military alliance. Ellen Bork, deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and Gary Schmitt, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, have advocated the creation of a military network in Asia similar to NATO in a paper on South Korea written in December of 2006. [1] The PNAC is a US think-tank whose members include Dick Cheney, George W. Bush Jr., Richard Perle, Lewis Libby, Karl Rove, Zalmay Khalilzhad, Richard Armitage, and Paul Wolfowitz.

No wonder Putin has been cranky lately, and is very uncomfortable about the US working to establish missile defense outposts in various places in Eastern Europe.

As the world inches ever closer towards another war in the Gulf region let's turn our focus to Europe, where the U.S. seeks to deploy an anti-missile shield armed with "interceptors." This has caused great consternation in Moscow. Washington seems befuddled by Russia's apparent "overreaction."

The major difference in the upcoming "Cold War II" is that this time, Russia has the real money and resources to pursue a huge arms development program, and the US is up to its ears in debt, not only from a standpoint of trade deficit, but also the US Federal deficit.

India, China and Russia account for 40 per cent of the world’s population, a fifth of its economy and more than half of its nuclear warheads. Now they appear to be forming a partnership to challenge the US-dominated world order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an hour and a half-long press conference which was attended by many members of the world media. The contents of that meeting---in which Putin answered all questions concerning nuclear proliferation, human rights, Kosovo, democracy and the present confrontation with the United States over missile defense in Europe---have been completely censored by the press. Apart from one brief excerpt which appeared in a Washington Post editorial, (and which was used to criticize Putin) the press conference has been scrubbed from the public record. It never happened. (Read the entire press conference archived here )

In this Punjabi city of shrines, Shiites and Sunnis prayed side by side during Ashura this week, the holiest holiday for the world's 150 million Shiite Muslims. But a province away, suicide bombers attempted to strike Shiite processions throughout Pakistan's NorthwestFrontierProvince, leaving as many as 21 dead and more than 40 injured in three separate incidents, including two suicide attacks.

If our "good friend in the war on terror" Musharraf loses the army, it's all over.

09/29/06 "Times Of India" --- -- WASHINGTON: A British analyst has stirred a hornet's nest by revealing that the United States is bankrolling Pakistan's military ruler Pervez Musharraf to the extent of $70-80 million a month, adding fuel to the dictator's incendiary visit to the West this month.

While interviewing Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf after the 1999 military coup that brought him to power, I was struck both by his plain-spoken honesty — and doubts that this rather eccentric general-turned-politician would survive. Running turbulent, unstable Pakistan is one of the world’s toughest, most dangerous jobs.

According to the Turkish Cihan news agency, the operation, involving about 50,000 troops, armored vehicles and combat aircraft, is targeting Kurdish militants in 11 provinces in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq.

The prospect that Turkish troops will invade northern Iraq to attack Kurdish rebels rose yesterday as Turkey reportedly asked to meet UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to reaffirm its right to self-defence.

Turkey has been massing troops on the border, and reminding the UN of its rights under the body's charter would signal the government is preparing the legal and diplomatic ground for military action.

Turkish troops shelled a border area in northern Iraq for a second day early yesterday in an attack on Kurdish rebels based there, a pro-Kurdish news agency reported. The report could not be confirmed immediately.

It looks like our "warning" to Turkey not to attack Northern Iran has fallen on frustratedly deaf ears.

Apparently, this was one of the many, many number of things this adnministration never saw coming.

The old saying is true: Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. The answer to excessive risk-taking is "let 'em fail."

Wall Street wants a free ride. They want to gamble with their money, win huge gains, but expect government to protect them from losses and all on the backs of the ordinary working stiff.

The problem with bailouts, which is where this is heading, is that even those Americans who were smart enough not to get caught up ion the real-estate bubble, are going to wind up paying the costs of it all, just as working people who had nothing to do with the reckless S&L lending policies of the 80s ultimately paid the costs of that disaster.

National borders serve the same function as fireproof doors in buildings or watertight bulkheads in ships. They contain and limit unexpected damage.

Fire doors contain a fire so that the whole building does not burn. Watertight bulkheads contain a leak so that the whole ship does not sink. National borders contain economic crisis and disease outbreaks so that the whole planet does not collapse.

But like building owners who nail open fire doors to improve traffic flow, or ship owners who do not bother to maintain the watertight doors because of cost, the globalists see the barriers as an inconvenience to be gotten rid of, in order to speed their acquisition of wealth.

And like the fire that has spread beyond the point of origin, or the water that has breached the adjacent watertight compartments, the economic disaster created by reckless US fiscal policies is spreading and threatens the entire planet.

Early this morning China let the idiots in Washington, and on Wall Street, know that it has them by the short hairs. Two senior spokesmen for the Chinese government observed that China’s considerable holdings of US dollars and Treasury bonds “contributes a great deal to maintaining the position of the dollar as a reserve currency.”

Artificial Economics, the brainchild of the Master Planners, has focused on building an economy where debt — not income — pays for goods and services. The emphasis upon debt instead of income via hyper-inflating the money supply in stealth fashion, has destroyed the dreams of millions of Americans. Artificial Economics is a silent economic disease. A coming significant devaluation of the dollar is a likely and necessary consequence.

Gas, and imported products (which are most of what you buy) are about to double in price by US Government fiat.

Back when this nation was founded, money had a fixed value, The coins were minted in precious metal that had intrinsic value. Such coins minted in silver and gold by Rome still have value today.

Paper notes were originally a convenience for people who did not wish to carry heavy sacks of coins around. But the paper note was not the money itself, and those United States silver and gold certificates could be taken to the bank and traded for the actual silver and gold coinage at any time. Those coins retained their value no matter what the government did. The worth of your money remained under your control.

Things are different now. Paper notes are "Federal Reserve" notes and they are not tradeable for any silver or gold coinage at the banks or treasury. Indeed those notes are not even money; they are "instruments of debt". Each Federal Reserve Note represents a unit of debt borrowed from the privately-owned Federal Reserve Banks by the US Government on which interest must be paid. As this article illustrates, the US Government and the Federal Reserve can arbitrarily change the value of those notes at any time. Control of the worth of your money has passed from your hands to the government.

And unlike Rome's money, when the US Government falls, the worth of those Federal Reserve Notes will vanish.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The United States is headed for a recession that will be "much nastier, deeper and more protracted" than the 2001 recession, says Nouriel Roubini, president of Roubini Global Economics.

He had expected to see mites or amoebas, perennial pests of bees. Instead, he found internal organs swollen with debris and strangely blackened. The bees' intestinal tracts were scarred, and their rectums were abnormally full of what appeared to be partly digested pollen. Dark marks on the sting glands were telltale signs of infection.

Okay, so we now rule out mites and amoebic infections. This takes us back to the primary suspect; that artificial genes added to commercial plants to produce a pesticide have crossed over into the digestive bacteria inside the bees, turning their entire digestive system into a pesticide manufacturing plant.

I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list.

This rules out a mite or a fungus as the cause of colony collapse disorder. Logic tells us that since the fumigants and pesticides being used on the other hives have been around for a while that they too are not the cause of CCD. Hense, we are back to the theory that the artificial gene that produces a pesticide in GM crops has migrated into the digestive bacteria of the bees' (and humans') GI system and has turned those bacteria into pesticide producers.

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

This strikes me as a far more immediate and serious threat than a incr4ease of a tenth of a degree in global temperature 100 years from now. Where is Al Gore and "the cult" on the issue of GM foods' adverse effects on the biopshere?

This affects more than the price of honey. Many farmers rely on bees to pollinate their plants, so as bees leave, crops will fail the following seasons.

I would suggest correlating the areas where the bees have left with plantings using genetically modified seeds. If those plants don't "taste" right to the bees, that's a good reason for them to seek news homes. Alternatively, look for something that kills only the queen bees, because that will also cause the rest of the hive to disperse and look for other hives to join.

A new health scare erupted over soft drinks last night amid evidence they may cause serious cell damage. Research from a British university suggests a common preservative found in drinks such as Fanta and Pepsi Max has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA.

The problem - more usually associated with ageing and alcohol abuse - can eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's.

In a new study that may have major implications for the food industry, scientists at the University of Southampton have found what they believe is a definitive link between artificial food additives and hyperactivity and restlessness in young children.

So, sell the parents food laced with chemicals, then sell the parents drugs to cure the hyperactivity the food additives caused in the first place!

The US Food and Drug Administration says there is no need for an urgent review of the safety of aspartame, despite a new study showing the sweetener may cause cancer.

Yet another piece of Don Rumsfeld's great legacies to America, when he was at SEARLE, and ramrodded an approval of this poison thought the FDA.

And by the way, if you really think that the FDA is concerned about your health, please think again.

Their position that there is "no need for an urgent review of the safety of aspartame" shows just how concerned they are about the financial health of the corporation making the product, not your health.

Internet repression is eroding freedom of expression online as more governments block sites and arrest bloggers, a human rights group warned today.

Amnesty International said the internet could change beyond all recognition unless action is taken and it called on governments and companies to respect people's right to freedom of expression online.

"The virus of internet repression is spreading. The 'Chinese model' - of an internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy - is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers," said Tim Hancock, UK campaigns director of Amnesty International.

State-sponsored censorship of the internet has increased significantly in recent years, according to a recent study of 41 countries conducted during 2006 and 2007 by the OpenNet Initiative, a consortium of researchers from four major universities, including Harvard and Oxford.

In a report last month, ONI said at least 25 of the 41 countries it tested were engaged in some form of filtering, where governments block access to specific sites or sites featuring particular words or themes.

In January 2006, Google agreed to offer a censored version of its own search engine to gain state approval and access to China's fast-growing market, although Google also maintained a non-filtered Chinese search engine hosted on US soil.

Yahoo! was pilloried for releasing data to the Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of dissident Li Zhi for eight years in 2003, and reporter Shi Tao for 10 years in 2005.

The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end this fall, if recent proposals in the U.S. Congress prove successful. State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other Internet-service connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail.

Would the Founding Fathers have sat still for such taxes?

Folks, we have reached the point of utter ridiculousness. The cash-strapped and broke government is taxing EVERYTHING, even rain!

"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution."W. Lance Bennett

"The Bush majority on the FCC has bowed to the interests of the big cable and telephone companies to strip away, or undo, the Internet’s basic DNA of openness and non-discrimination.”Bill Moyers,

American Telegraph neutrality law;

"...messages received from any individual, company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of their reception, excepting that the dispatches of the government shall have priority."

—An act to facilitate communication between the Atlantic and Pacific states by electric telegraph., June 16, 1860

On January 3, 2007, the New York Times ran an editorial entitled "Protecting Internet Democracy". What the Times was referring to, was the need to uphold the "principle of Net Neutrality", the principle according to which Internet service providers (ISPs—essentially mega cable and telephone companies, such as AT&T, Verizon, Bell South, Comcast and other phone and cable giants which own physical infrastructures), should not be able to favor some users over others, because such a power would inevitably lead to censorship.

Indeed, what the giant telecommunications companies would like to obtain from politicians and from the five-person Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the right to filter content and commercialize the Internet, using broadband lines, and to price-discriminate between users. They would like to obtain the right to charge websites to deliver their content to consumers and to give preferential service to favored clients by setting up special toll booths on the information superhighway. Their purpose is to be able to establish a two-tiered Internet system, with fast high fare lanes and slower lower fare lanes. Net-accessing users who pay hefty fees would have their Web pages delivered on the Internet in the current speedy fashion; other users who do not fork over a ton of cash to the service providers would be relegated to the slow lanes and would be placed at a big disadvantage. In such a system, the big Internet users would have access to exclusive deals and would become bigger, while the individuals, the creators, the innovators and the other small users would remain small or disappear. —Only the richest corporations would have access to the prime bandwidth opened by telecommunications corporations, while other smaller Internet users would be left behind.

The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). If the increased rates remain unchanged, the majority of webcasters will go bankrupt and silent on this date. Internet radio needs your help! The Internet Radio Equality Act has recently been introduced in both the House (H.R. 2060) and Senate (S. 1353) to save the Internet radio industry. Please call your senators and your representative to ask them to co-sponsor the Internet Radio Equality Act.

Professor Steven Jones presenting his X-ray spectrometry evidence from samples taken at the WTC site. They dramatically show a PERFECT MATCH for the highly specialized compound "thermate" (used for cutting through steel) found in the WTC debris. (And no, thermate was NOT used during the clean up operation...this stuff was in the building, and ignited, prior to collapse.) If you're new to this information, you might want to check out "Molten Metal" and "Fire Initiated Collapse - Primary Arguments Against"

The shortages of food, water supplies, fuel and medicine are so alarming that organizations like UNRWA and OXFAM are calling for an immediate re-opening of Gaza’s border. The World Food Program says that Gaza’s food stocks will only last for another two weeks, four at most, if more shipments are not let in. Hospitals and clinics have only barely been able to function with the help of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

If there is one thing Israel has down to a very fine black art, it is the exercize of collective punishment.

The Palestinian electricity company that supplies most of Gaza will cut power to the area later today because Israel has shut a crossing through which fuel supplies are transported.

"For two days we have not received fuel," the chairman of the Gaza Generating Company, Rafik Malikha, told a press conference today. "The Israeli side is preventing vehicles from approaching the crossing."

A spokesman for the Israeli army, Shlomo Dror, confirmed that the Nahal Oz crossing had been closed for a few days, apparently for security reasons. He said he did not know exactly why the crossing has been closed.

There is one element that successive Israeli governments have developed to a high, nasty art: collective punishment.

That is precisely what is happening in Gaza right now.

And remember: Hamas was the legitimately elected party in last year's Palestinian elections.

Israel is doing it's bit to guarantee that Fatah and Hamas never reunite to lead the Palestinian people. They are, as usual, showing favouritism towards Fatah by considering paying them tax funds which are owed. This Israel sees as 'humanitarian aid' to ease the suffering of the people in Gaza. Actually, this is Israel's way of guaranteeing that there will not be a flood of refugees to Israel from the war torn area.

A beleaguered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared a state of emergency and disbanded the Hamas-led unity government after the Islamic militant group vanquished its Fatah rivals and effectively took control of the Gaza Strip on Thursday

Aides to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday that U.S. diplomats told them Washington plans to shun a future Hamas-Fatah coalition government because it will not explicitly recognize Israel.

The part that they are not mentioning is that the Hamas-Fatah government will be happy to recognize Israel ... just as soon as Israel recognizes Palestine.

The United Nations resolution that created the state of Israel also created the state of Palestine. But Israel, right from the start, has taken the position that Palestine does not exist, while hypocritically demanding recognition of Israeli statehood at the exact same time.

Some 250,000 Palestinians have been closed off from the rest of the West Bank by the separation fence, according to a report released by "Bimkom - Planners for Planning Rights" human rights organization.

In some areas, the villages are fenced in from three or four angles, cutting them off from urban centers, sources of livelihood and service centers, severely harming daily life to the point of disintegration of the Palestinian society in the area.

Can we say, deliberately created ghettos, boys and girls? I knew you could!

And so much of this kind of activity is financed by our tax dollars given as aid to Israel: doesn't it make you feel proud?

Pilger on the genocide that is engulfing Palestine as bystanders silently look on

A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. "Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide," wrote the former senior UN relief official Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, then foreign minister of Sweden, in Le Figaro. They described a people "living in a cage", cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water, and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.

My Disclaimer:

I present this information in my capacity as a human being, under Common Law, exercising my fundamental God given rights and freedoms. This information represents my private thoughts and beliefs and has been compiled and expressed for educational purposes only. In no way should it be construed as either legal or financial advice. If anyone feels a need to determine the accuracy of this information and the effectiveness of apply any of it, I strongly recommend consulting a competent expert on this subject matter.

Here's a Clue:Look the one place "They" never talk about.Look to your heart, as your competent expert lies within."Seek and you shall find."